Benjamin Nienass

Focusing on Openness: Re-reading the Debate on European Identity Benjamin Nienass

This work proposes an alternative reading of the debate on European identity. It is concerned with the practical implications that different theoretical identity configurations have on the everyday level. The analysis provided here shows that the debate on European identity, both on the practical and the theoretical level, is in fact a disguised debate on human agency. To conceptualize the possibility of human agency, a discursive approach is suggested which highlights the importance of openness in discourses of identity. In a second step, potentially more inclusive approaches, such as the post-national approach by Jürgen Habermas, are analyzed with regard to their modes of unification and closure. Subsequently, it is argued that both communitarian and post-national approaches, although having differences in the practical level of inclusiveness, contain an inherent mode to secure identity. Viewed from the premise of generating a possibility of human agency through openness, the presented proposition advocates that an alternative understanding of difference and ambiguity is needed.